Dan Veach is the founding editor of the international poetry journal Atlanta Review. His translations from Chinese, Arabic, Spanish and Anglo-Saxon have won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and the Independent Publisher Book Award. His translations include Flowers of Flame: Unheard Voices of Iraq (Michigan State University Press, 2008), Beowulf & Beyond (Lockwood Press, 2021), Songs of The Cid (Stockcero, 2022), and Federico García Lorca: Gypsy Romances and Poem of the Deep Song (Stockcero, 2022). Spanish Ballads: The Soul of Spain is forthcoming in 2023. His poetry collections are Elephant Water (Finishing Line Press, 2012) and Lunchboxes (Iris Press, 2019).
Tao Yuan-ming, who lived around 400 A.D., stands first in the line of China’s great lyric poets. Just as the Impressionists taught us to see in a new way, Tao taught the Chinese a lyrical attitude toward life. Creator of an intimate, honest, plain-spoken style, Tao was a man whose life spoke as eloquently as his art. Indeed, no poet’s life and art have ever been more of a piece.